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Saturday, 8 December 2012

Will the Tablet survey saga put the laughing policeman out of business?

Last week I posted on the Tablet survey on the now established translation. Five days later, after a lot of comment in the blogosphere about how they had misquoted the texts about which they were asking people's opinion, the survey was corrected and the results to date were trashed. So now there is a new version, which has re-jigged the questions. There's a "ner ner" question comparing the old ICEL to the usus antiquior:

Just as admirers of the Tridentine Rite have been allowed to continue using the pre-Conciliar liturgy, I think people who favour the old English-language translation of the Mass should be allowed to celebrate it in that version.

So there!

Another question of the kind that Bara Brith compares to the Blackadder and The Flanders Pigeon Murderer trial asks whether you think that "Some of the florid language is obsequious and distracting." The title of the survey is itself of the same genre: "The new Mass text - has it won you over?" because, you know, with all that florid obsequiousness it couldn't just be accepted enthusiastically from the word go, you have to be won over to it.

You would think that after the embarrassment of having to correct the mistakes in the previous version of a survey that would obviously attract considerable attention, someone would have made sure that the new version was sub-edited so that a howler like this didn't get published:

Still, do go over and complete the survey - and any subsequent revised versions. As you do so, you might want to play this in the background: